Organ Practice: Importance of Structured Goal Setting

Do you ever find yourself in a situation that you sit on the organ bench and practice your organ music but are not accomplishing anything of importance in organ playing? If this is the case, it is very likely because you don't have any structured goals set for your future. In this article, I will share with you my thoughts about the importance of structured goal setting for organ playing.

If you don't have any important goals set for your organ playing, chances are that you are not advancing very much. Just think about it for a moment.

How can you achieve your goal, if you don't know what the goal is? Even more importantly, how can you achieve your goal, if you even don't have one?

Your goals can be long-term goals or short-term goals. Long-term goals work best for your future accomplishments and short-term goals work really well for your everyday practice.

An example of a long-term goal would be becoming competent church organist or a famous recitalist or developing excellent organ sight-reading skills and so on. All these long-term goals are related to much longer periods of time - most likely many months, sometimes years.

Shorter range goals, on the other hand, work really well for supporting your longer range goals. An example of a shorter range goal would be mastering a specific piece of organ music. This could be even shorter and more specific, like mastering a particular section of that piece.

Your goal would be small, if it fits into one practice session. They are the things that you want to accomplish in one sitting. Just remember that one practice session leads to another and another. So they can lead to the larger goal you are setting for yourself for the future.

A final thing to remember is that your longer range goals should be exciting enough that you will feel some sort of challenge and excitement for yourself when you will reach them. If the goal doesn't excite you enough to strive for it to be persistent and persevere in your daily practice, it probably means that it is too small.

So your short-term goals must be very specific. If you do this, they will contribute to your long-term goals.

Apply my tips in your goal-setting practice and you will discover how much faster you will progress in organ playing because you will have vision for the future.